Robert Collis, The Silver Fleece: An Autobiography

Abstract

Robert Collis (1900–1975) was born in Killiney, County Dublin, to a prosperous solicitor father and a mother who lavished affection on him from infancy, to the detriment of his neglected twin brother John, whose work is featured later in this volume. Collis’s schooldays at Rugby coincided with tumultuous events in both Ireland and Europe, the contrasting local reactions to which he succinctly evokes in Part 2 of his autobiography, from which the following extract is taken. He studied medicine at Cambridge and also excelled at rugby, winning seven caps for Ireland during the 1920s. Although he subsequently flourished professionally during his time in various London hospitals, Collis increasingly felt himself to be a ‘prisoner of the machine age’ in England and hankered after the pastoral landscapes of his youth. The Silver Fleece ends with his dream of return coming true. In 1932 he was appointed to the staff of the National Children’s Hospital in Dublin, a post that launched him on a path that led to his becoming an internationally renowned paediatrician and a pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis and cerebral palsy. After the Second World War Collis worked with the Red Cross to rehabilitate Holocaust survivors at Belsen and, with his partner Han Hogerzeil, adopted five liberated children, one of whom, Zoltan Zinn-Collis, published his memoirs in 2006. Collis also wrote two plays, Marrowbone Lane (1939) and The Barrel Organ (1942), and acted as authorial mentor to the disabled Dublin writer Christy Brown, for whose acclaimed autobiography, My Left Foot (1954), he wrote a foreword.